The peace thus extorted by circumstances was never intended to be kept; and, from the moment that the new King and Queen of Castile put foot in their land, they did their uttermost to encourage the growing opposition to Aragonese interference. Ferdinand, thwarted and ignored by his son-in-law and deserted by the Castilians, at length departed in dudgeon to visit the kingdom that Gonsalvo de Cordova had won for him in Naples; but it was not destined that the work to which he and Isabel had given the greater part of their lives should come to nought. In the autumn of 1506 the Archduke Philip died at Burgos; and Joanna, sunk in one of her moods of morbid lethargy, referred those of her subjects, who would have persuaded her to rule for herself, to Ferdinand’s authority. From July, 1507, when Ferdinand returned to Spain, till his death in January, 1516, he governed Castile as regent; while the loss of the only child born to him of his union with Germaine de Foix preserved his dominions intact for “Joanna the Mad” and her eldest-born, the future Emperor Charles V. Naples, it is true, by the terms of his second marriage treaty should have been once more divided with the French Crown; but the Catholic King was to reap the reward of loyalty to the Holy See, and received a papal dispensation from the fulfilment of his inconvenient pledge. Victories on the North African coast against Barbary pirates and the conquest of Southern Navarre closed his days in a halo of glory; and he passed to his final resting-place beside Isabel in the Royal Chapel at Granada regretted even by the Castilians and mourned by the Aragonese as their “last King.” Henceforth Spain was to be one and undivided. “No reproach attaches to him,” says Guicciardini of Ferdinand, “save his lack of generosity and faithlessness to his word.” Peter Martyr declares that “contrary to the belief of all men he died poor.” Like Henry VII. of England he had been quick to lay hands on wealth, doling it out to others with the grudging reluctance of the miser; but the exhausted treasury he left showed that his main inspiration had been economy not avarice. His ambitions had been expensive, and Spain was to pay heavily both in money and the more precious coin of human life; but the fact that she could afford to enter the great national struggle with France at all marks the economic transformation that had taken place since the days of Henry IV. of Castile. She had passed from industrial infancy to prosperity and an assured commercial position; her population had increased; peace at home had given her financial security; while as the depôt for European trade with the New World vistas of profit opened before her.